1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to audio playback systems and in particular to methods and systems for playing audio from a digital source, wirelessly transferring the source data to a set of digital powered speakers or headphones.
2. Background of the Related Art
The concept of a player piano has been well known for many years. Until recently, player pianos have been built using electromechanical techniques, reading the music from rolls of punched paper. In the last decade or so, several companies have developed electronic player piano modules that can be attached to a standard piano. These modules typically read music data from a digital media, such as a floppy disk, CD-ROM, and actuate electromechanical solenoids to drive the keys on the piano.
More recently, companies have added audio playback capabilities to these player piano modules, so the piano can be automatically played while being accompanied by an arrangement of backup music. Often a popular artist's music is re-mixed without the solo piano and the player piano fills in the solo piano part.
Typically the audio playback portion of these systems is an afterthought, designed for convenient installation, but not for best sound quality. Furthermore, these systems, because they require wiring speakers back to the piano where the player piano controller resides, either mount the speakers to the piano, where the combined output of both the speaker and piano causes resonances that distort the sound of the piano and the speaker, or run wires across the floor to attach to an external audio or speaker system. Even when the physical running of the wires is not a problem, degradation of sound quality always takes place whenever an analog audio signal is transmitted down a conductor, regardless of whether gold, silver, copper or even exotic materials like carbon fiber are used. The audio cable industry has spent significant amounts of money developing new and purer conductive materials, such as “6-nines” copper (99.9999% pure) and experimented with a wide array of cable construction techniques and dielectrics such as teflon in the effort to reduce impedance mismatches, ringing, distortion, and smearing or roll-off of the audio signal's frequency response before it travels down a conductor to the next audio component.
Finally, when a player piano module is attached to a very high quality piano, it is especially important that the sound quality of the playback system be high enough to match the sound of the piano. Thus, there is a need for a system that provides enhanced flexibility in speaker placement and eliminates much more of the conventional systems wiring so that the audio can be delivered in as close to the original form as possible.